An Aesthetics of Borders, Globalization and Migration in Post-Partition India

Jogen Chowdhury (b.1939) 33a Untitled (Head), 1977 Pastel and ink on paper 15 × 14 7/8 in 33b Man with Piece of Paper, 1986 Pastel and ink on paper 15 × 11 in

Born in a small village in present-day Bangladesh, Jogen Chowdhury’s family relocated to a refugee camp in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1947 following the Partition of Bengal. After graduating from the Government College of Art and Craft in 1960, he began work as a teacher in a secondary school in Howrah Zilla. A gifted writer and poet, as well as a visual artist, he spent his free time painting and organizing a literary and cultural group that published its first journal in 1961. In 1967, he went to Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. When he returned to India, in 1968, he relocated to Madras (now Chennai) to work as a textile designer in the Handloom Board, where he remained until 1972, when he shifted to Delhi to take on the position of curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhavan. In 1987, he returned permanently to West Bengal to take on the post of professor of painting at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan.

Deliberately individual in his approach to art making, Chowdhury defied shifting artistic trends towards abstraction in the 1960s and 1970 to hone and perfect instead a unique vocabulary for figural representation. In a recent interview with Nawaid Anjum, he noted, “I believe that abstraction exists also in ‘real’ forms, in the human figures or any other object.”58 A close observer of people, he was drawn particularly to the facial expressions and bodily gestures associated with elevated emotive states of joy and agony, which he captured through his mastery of texture and emotionally charged line, and also through the intentional distortion of heads and bodies. He has described these intentionally distorted figures as metaphors for the social and economic imbalances that have characterized Indian society since Independence. The gaze of Chowdhury’s frequently introverted figures is often focused inward, at an angle, or away from the viewer. He is best known for his portrayals of single figures, closely cropped within the composition, and set against a dark and seemingly empty background that focuses the viewer’s attention on the main subject, while also eliding a specificity of place.

The two works in the Gaur Collection are outstanding examples of Chowdhury’s technical prowess and discerning eye. Man with Piece of Paper features exactly that: a middleaged man, likely an intellectual, with a receding hairline, stares off into the distance, while holding a sheet of paper closely against his chest in an elongated, almost Mannerist, hand. His head is tilted upward and his eyes are slightly crossed, as if his thoughts were turned inward in a state of deep contemplation, an impression that is reinforced also through his furrowed brow and the taut contours of his face. His state of dishevelment suggests that he remains oblivious to the world around him: half of his shirt buttons have come undone, and his collar crookedly frames his neck. The subject of his contemplation remains unknown, as the paper that he grasps is elusively blank.

The untitled work from 1977 portrays a man in profile, with an almost impossibly large and lumpy head resting upon strangely misshapen shoulders. The figure is stripped of any identifying markers save a pair of thin wire spectacles tucked behind a disproportionately tiny ear. Like the paper in the 1986 work, the spectacles suggest that the man being represented is an intellectual. Here, Chowdhury’s mastery of the line is evident in both the delicate definition of key facial features: the eyes, the nostrils, the ear, the chin and the upper lip, as well as in the use of dense cross-hatching to

33a | Untitled (Head)

Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002)

37 Bombay Beggars, 1944 Watercolor on paper 22 × 15 in

A rebel and an iconoclast, Francis Newton Souza had the kind of charisma that both attracted and repelled those around him, and a way with words as well as the paintbrush, both of which he wielded like a scimitar. Born in Portuguese Goa, where he spent his early years, he was raised in British India’s Bombay (now Mumbai). He was scarred by the loss of his father while an infant; by smallpox as a teenager; and by his rustication from Sir J. J. School of Art in his final year for having dared to join the Communist Party of India. He had famously also been thrown out of St Xavier’s School earlier on the charge of drawing obscene paintings in the lavatory—which he denied for their lack of quality.

His run-ins with the hidebound Bombay Art Society, with its strict criterion of rules and regulations, was the reason that he felt the need for a more dynamic and progressive art platform. The Progressive Artists’ Group was borne of that idea, co-founded by him along with five other artists (and, later, seven associates); Souza’s manifesto was an excoriating document that indicted what passed for “modern” at the time. An exhibition in which a nude self-portrait was exhibited won him opprobrium, and the continuing moral outrage was one of the reasons he chose to leave Bombay in 1949, settling in London where, after a period of initial struggle, his talent won him tremendous success. His departure, in 1967, for New York, for reasons more personal than professional, failed to further advance his career.

Bombay Beggars was painted while Souza was still an art student and likely the result of his then Marxist ideology that drew his painterly attention to the condition of the poor in the city. One of the pioneers of subaltern modernism in India, Souza’s figurative muse in those formative years were the city’s poor and disenfranchised. During those formative years of his career, the marginalized often formed the subject of his paintings and consisted of family groups located within the milieu of their woebegone homes. His palette tended to the somber to reflect the hardworking bronzed skins and hardened features.

Bombay Beggars stands out because the figures are shown outdoors, a space they were more likely to be found than in any tenements. The group is shown unclothed—possibly the first among such paintings in which he dispensed with the need for apparel altogether. His later paintings would feature nudes as well as landscapes but in circumstances vastly different from this. Note must also be made of the signature. Souza was then known by his middle name Newton and signed his paintings as such; the Souza attestation here points to the signature being added to the painting at a later date. [KS]

37 | Bombay Beggars

Abstraction

Ram Kumar (1924–2018)

42a Untitled, 1982 Acrylic on paper 22 × 29 in 42b Untitled, 1986 Acrylic on paper 11 × 16 in

Between 1949 and 1952 Ram Kumar studied in Paris with André Lhote, of the first generation of “Salon” Cubists, and with Fernand Léger. Like Léger, Ram Kumar joined the Communist Party of France, which supported the cause of the liberation of Europe’s colonies. In Paris, Ram Kumar, who also wrote novels and short stories, befriended the writer Louis Aragon, likewise a member of the Communist Party, and one of the founders of Surrealism, who had by the time Ram Kumar met him turned away from that movement and embraced Socialist Realism. Perhaps it was under the influence of Aragon that, in the early 1950s, Ram Kumar painted works like Unemployed Graduates (1953), which depicts four young South Asian men, in suits and ties, idle and disconsolate. Ram Kumar modeled his alienated figures starkly, in the fashion of French Socialist Realists, especially André Fougeron, another leftist. But, after 1953, the discipline exerted by the Party on painters to work in a narrow Socialist Realist style loosened, and Ram Kumar shifted permanently away from figure groups towards cityscapes, influenced by his visits to Greece, Venice, and, most importantly, the sacred city of Varanasi in 1960. Varanasi (or Benares), on the banks of the Ganges, is where Hindus prefer to be cremated after their death, their ashes set to drift off on the holy river’s currents, an act that promises salvation.

In 1970 Ram Kumar was awarded a John D. Rockefeller III scholarship to spend a year in New York City. It was during this sojourn that the artist began to explore fully abstract, gestural painting. The mark-making in the three works in this exhibition demonstrate an immediate, gestural 42c Untitled, 1986 Acrylic on paper 11 × 16 in

expressiveness in the manner of the New York school. The two works from 1986, each painted in acrylic on sheets of 11x16 inch paper, although fully abstract, are nonetheless reminiscent of Ram Kumar’s paintings of river towns. Both have jutting tongues of watery indigo flowing laterally through them or pushing forward into the center, like the canals and embankments of Ram Kumar’s riverside cityscapes. They flow between and through the passages of black strokes, the only other pigment in these austere paintings. In the earlier, larger work, from 1982, the same two colors are more completely mixed together. All three works reveal something of the underlying structure of Ram Kumar’s cityscapes: a quilt of knife strokes in blocks and patches, mingling the grimy blacks and grays of urban housing blocks along narrow alleys and the murky blues of city waterways. Significantly though, they lack the outlines of doorways, balconies, windows, and gabled rooftops that are the sign of cityscapes in his earlier work. There is no rectilinearity, only fluidity. These abstract paintings are, simply, awash.

And yet the fluidly spontaneous structure of these works is not simply the product of happenstance. Ram Kumar routinely produced, as part of his practice, abstract line drawings in which improvised but carefully controlled parallel and cross-hatched lines define faceted, canted and overlapping planes, and the shallow spaces underlying them. These three paintings on paper relate to those line drawings but replace the intersecting blocks of crosshatching with individual strokes of the palette knife. Yet they also loosen the density of the drawings. Compared with the other abstract works in this exhibition, by Kapoor,

42a | Untitled

Reddy, and Kolte, these three pictures stand out for their spare simplicity, eschewing the complexities of process and careful compositional balance of those others. Interestingly, this unbinding of process contrasts quite a bit with Ram Kumar’s own cityscapes (such as Townscape, in the present exhibition), which insistently explored the tension between a picturesque, irregular built environment and the plumb and level lines of the picture’s edges. The poet Ranjit Hoskote has suggested that, late in his career, Ram Kumar, in keeping with the Hindu teaching of the individual’s changing priorities through life’s different stages, or ashramas—the progression from householder to hermit to, finally, ascetic— “turned from the cacophony of civil life to meditate on the ceremonials of decay and dissolution … he stands upon that threshold where the anguish of the self is sublimated into the universal rhythm of creation and destruction.” In these three paintings the artist seems to turn his back on the windows, doors, and façades of the city and, from the vantage point of the steps leading down into the sacred, swirling waters of the Ganges, gaze into its endless flow as it swirls the ashes of this mortal existence away in its eddies, downstream towards eternity. [MM]

Sources of Illustrations

The Intimacy of Paper Figs 5, 7: Reproduced with permission of DACS; © Estate of F. N. Souza; All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2022. Fig. 6: Courtesy of the Google Art Project.

A Brief History of Printmaking in India Figs 1, 2: Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd. Fig. 4: Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

An Aesthetics of Borders, Globalization, and Migration in Post-Partition India Figs 2, 3: Reproduced with permission of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; © Zarina. Fig. 4: Courtesy of Julio César Morales, the artist, and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. Fig. 5: Reproduced with permission of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; © Zarina. Image courtesy of Lamay Photo. Fig. 6: Courtesy of Nyugen Smith, the artist. Fig. 7: Courtesy of Nyugen Smith, the artist, and the Solomon Collection. Fig. 8: Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York; © Emily Jacir. Ancient Narratives of Devotion: Continuity, Transformation, Rejection Figs 1, 2: Reproduced with permission; © the M. F. Husain Estate. Fig. 3: Courtesy of the National Museum, New Delhi. Fig. 5: Courtesy of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. Fig. 6: Courtesy of DAG, New Delhi. Fig. 7: Courtesy of the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Fig. 8: Reproduced with permission from the Bhupen Khakhar estate; courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd. Fig. 9: Reproduced with permission from the Bhupen Khakhar estate; courtesy of Artforum. Fig. 10: Courtesy of Atul Dodiya, the artist. Fig. 11: Courtesy of STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore. Fig. 12: Reproduced with permission of the Cy Twombly Foundation; © Cy Twombly Foundation; courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Cacophonies and Silence: Hearing Abstraction Fig. 1: Reproduced with permission of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; © Zarina. Fig. 5: Courtesy of Navjot Altaf, the artist. Fig. 6: Reprinted from Hanning dadi (Frozen Land) (Changsha: Hu’nan Meishu, 2000). Fig. 8: Courtesy of the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania. Figs 9, 10, 11: Reproduced with permission of DACS; © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ARS, NY 2022. Figs 10, 11: Courtesy of Ken Lee. Catalog Entries Entries 3, 23, 28–29: Reproduced with permission; © the M. F. Husain Estate; Image on p. 74 courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd. Entry 5: Image on p. 78 courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation. Entries 8–9: Reproduced with permission of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; © Zarina. Entry 11: Image on p. 100 courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Entry 17: Image on p. 122 courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Image on p. 124 courtesy of Tamara Sears. Entry 27: Image 27a courtesy of DAG, New Delhi. Entry 31: Image on p. 171 courtesy of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Entries 37–39: Reproduced with permission of DACS; © Estate of F. N. Souza; All Rights Reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY 2022. Entry 40: Image on p. 200 courtesy of Tamara Sears. Entry 43: Reproduced with permission of DACS; © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2022. Entry 45: Image 45e courtesy of DAG, New Delhi.